Re: a flaming hot worm being bait [glob2-devel] We must do a game, not an engine

[Kyle Lutze]

Cyrille Dunant wrote:
> On Thursday 26 April 2007 07.41:07 Kyle Lutze wrote:
> > > On Lots of days many glob2 devs wrote:
> > > words
> > GAH! can't we all get along?!
> >
> > 1) bradley wants to do a core code rewrite, LET HIM! he's not being
> > paid to help, he's volunteering his time and doing something that
> > desperately needs to be done and not many are willing/able to do.
> >  From what I gather he also doesn't want to work on the current code
> > base because it's no longer fun and causes lots of headaches
> > figuring things out and I don't want to see him leave over you guys
> > trying to force him to continue working on that.
>
> I sure can't prevent him. And as long as it works as well at the end, never 
> mind.
> But I am afraid that the "rewrites" are never quite complete (see nct and his 
> skins)...
steph, rebuttal?

> > 2) Cyrille: you seem to think rewrites are worthless and that time
> > should be concentrated elsewhere, such as neat-o graphics. That's
> > good, except that the guys doing the rewrites are coders, and that's
> > their passion and they may not want/be able to do graphics that
> > would do the game justice. On the other hand, what's stopping you?
>
> I did the anims last week or so. Because I believe in nice graphics. 
sweet, thank you :)
> > 3) I always like to point at the kernel development for this, if we
> > had more developers it would be much more practicable too (at least
> > from what I read this is how they do it)
> >
> > each major release, such as 2.4 to 2.6 is a complete rewrite. The
> > rewrite is done when they find a block in the previous release that
> > prevents them from moving forward, but they keep working on the old
> > version to help it keep going in the meantime.
>
> And we just got Yet Another Scheduler. But the usb layer still sucks, and some 
> devices won't work. Of course everyone is free  to do what they want. But be 
> honest, say it is for fun, don't rationalize it.
those bastards! Although they did manage to fix my keyboard issue 
which was nice. Did you ever ask them why this is though? Maybe it's 
that they can't fix it because they forgot to include some necessary 
code to allow them to implement something that is needed?
> > that skinny version in context of glob2: as bradley said, the code
> > started out decent, and steph and nuage did a great job, but then
> > more futures were to be added that the current code couldn't support
> > and two choices were presented: rewrite all the code to make room,
> > or hack it in, many chose the ladder.
>
> Actually, if you look at the codebase, you will realise that the vast majority 
> of the code comes from nct and nuage. They did not, mainly, "hack" new 
> features. However, certain parts of the code are written in a very convoluted 
> way.
Steph, what do you think about your code? I would prefer not to put 
words into your mouth.

> But again, you seem to assume things were hacked. No, things were don in ways 
> that are more convoluted, sometime for optimality reasons. Some optimizations 
> are probably nowadays not necessary anymore.
>
> This does not mean they are unclean! Optimized code is painful to look at. 
> Example: I needed sparse matrices. 
>
> 1) std::map<std::pair<size_t, size_t>, double> -- 0 lines of code, works.
> 2) operator overloading, valarrays and dedicated classes. speedup x 10 -- 50 
> lines of code
> 3) clever aliasing tricks to get rid of temporaries. speedup x 3 -- 500 lines 
> of complicated code
>
> Someone seeing that and going into the internals would say huggh, this is 
> horrible. I need to rewrite. And we would be back to step 1, which, let us 
> admit it, is wayyyy, cleaner.
I'm not that good of a coder, so I'll let everyone else poke and 
prod at that.
> > This leads us at crossroads at this point as the code has been
> > hacked so much that it went from the starting point steph and nuage
> > had it to to something where it's been hacked by many developers
> > over time (I've seen probably a dozen developers come and go while
> > I've been apart of the glob2 community) to the point where we can no
> > longer effectively work on the code to make the game better without
> > bashing heads.
>
> Uhhh, writing a campaign would make the game more valuable. With _no_ 
> additional code.
I thought we had joey's campaign, no? Also, wasn't there some issue 
when playing the campaign where deviating from it with doing things 
such as making extra buildings the campaign would stop. Game play 
would continue, but moving on to the next area failed. I think that 
required some code to fix.

> > I have to be honest, I've gotten a bit addicted to a different game
> > with my real life friends which is half the reason I haven't been
> > around glob2 as much, the game is eve-online. They started out with
> > a great game, but since then have been hacking mods in where the
> > code wasn't in place for it, but since it's an MMORPG they don't
> > have the time to do a complete rewrite, so they keep hacking the
> > code to do patches and now any sort of battle in the game lags to
> > all hell, node crashes, etc. which make the game not so playable
> > making people quit, bad reviews, and players starting to disrespect
> > the developers of the game for putting more "features" in before
> > fixing the annoying little bugs that don't cause the game to cease
> > functioning, but at the same time become very annoying to the point
> > that players start questioning if the game is still worth it (like me).
>
> You mean like rewriting the map format instead of fixing the desyncs? I mean, 
> everyone can do what he well pleases, but let us not be deluded on what is 
> actually useful _from_the_player's_point_of_view_.
Umm I was talking about eve there, and eve-online doesn't exactly 
work by using maps, and their desyncs are much more dramatic than 
ours, and from a player's point of view we're all complaining about 
the lag, bugs in the ships, etc.  and not the agent storylines 
they've been working on instead
> Because we are forgetting the players with all this rewrite talk, are we not?
back to glob2, we are players too, and we're not forgetting us, or 
the other players that aren't devs
> What are the issues they raise? what works not so well?
do you ever sit on irc? ask them when they come in about what's 
driving them nuts when they keep dropping back to the lobby because 
of a desync.

> What are the game balance issues?
blue beats red 100% of time, because I like the color blue, and it 
was a special day of the year for me when we wrote that code. ;)
> All of those points are important, and not one requires a rewrite, only 
> tuning.
/me screws up and drops a tool into the engine :P
> > Back to glob2. The code needs a rewrite so we can more easily
> > implement new units, buildings, put an end to some of the pesky net
> > game drop issues, etc. There is no way around this.
>
> I an getting angry. 
>
> THE CODE NEEDS NO REWRITE. IT NEEDS REFACTORING.
>
> > On the other hand, I do believe it would be nice for the people that
> > aren't interested on doing the rewrite to keep working on the 0.8.23
> > version right now. images can still be made and used in the rewrite,
> > maps that are made can still give an example and manually remade in
> > the new glob2, and making campaign stories are hard, but recreating
> > the maps, waypoints, etc. aren't nearly as hard as trying to come up
> > with the whole thing from scratch.
>
> most of the work in making a game is not code, it is graphics and writing and 
> maps. Look at the number of each profession at Blizzard :)
I'll agree that graphics, making maps, and writing campaigns are 
important, I have to disagree with you on the most of the game not 
being the code. how could you say that? 90% of a game is code, where 
do you think 9/10th of the time goes into when a company like that 
creates a game? do you really think that they start out by writing a 
few thousand lines of code and call it a day and then spend all the 
rest of the time doing graphics?

> > In a perfect world, how I think this stuff should be handled in the
> > future:
> > - we have a base (currently 0.8.23) that is worked on and updated,
> > etc. until we hit enough issues that it becomes better to rewrite
> > than continue hacking things in. At that point some of the people
> > keep working on the old release, some people move to the next step
>
> Once upon a time, a TODO was done which essentially said that the 1.0 is the 
> current state, debugged, with gfx and campaign finished.
>
> Are we working in that direction? NO.
umm, yes and no. We are going to a 1.0, just taking a different 
route to go there. As long as people are working on the game, it 
will never die. As long as even the developers are playing, it won't 
die. The general public's interest in the game may die down until we 
get to the 1.0 release, but the game itself will not die, I won't 
let it, and I'm certain steph won't either. I've put too much time 
and money into the game to let it, so we shall never go there again.

> > - we have a beta group working on a rewrite. This group should be
> > able to take much of the extra libs and includes for a decent start,
> > and if all code is documented in the base, and notes are included on
> > where things were hacked in and why, it will speed up the
> > development process of the beta to get to the point where the base
> > is, and be able to add in extra features without the headaches that
> > originally existed.
> >
> > ================
> I do gfx, sometimes. When I have the time and motivation. Yes, I am a 
> bottleneck, sorry.
I never said you were a bottleneck, I meant I've been out of date 
and really had no idea what some of you guys have been up to. I 
didn't mean it as any sort of insult, thank you for letting me know.
> Actually, from Rama's drawing, I did ~90% of the graphics.
>
> And you know what?
>
> they need a redraw.
idea.compare (redraw, rewrite);
> :)
I have never disapproved of any work that anyone has done that makes 
this game better. Writing a game for the most part is a thankless 
job, so i would like to take this time to thank everyone for the 
time and effort they've put into the game, especially steph and 
nuage for creating it and getting me involved (I don't remember how 
I found out about it) and Bradley as he's contributed a lot, 
including new AI's which I know is hard. I could go on and list 
everyone and the work they've done, but that would take a whole 
e-mail in itself.

> CU
Kyle
>  -- CFD
   -- I have no idea what that means